Day by Day

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Continuing a trend, here's a photo of something that fascinated me in the Dominican Republic. They would thatch the roof of any building they could with palms from local trees, interweaving them into one continuous roof. They worked like a charm, too. The dining area where we stayed was covered with this thatching, and when it rained we never got a drop of water on us.

So naturally, I took a picture of it from the inside. It's 1.51MB if you want to download it.

I decided on the Nikon D40x. We ordered it from AAFES online, because we saved a flaming assload of money. I'd love to have it right now, but I'll delay my gratification in order to save that much cash.

Once I get it in my hot little hands, I'll post a few test shots for y'all.

Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

While the totals are still far lower than they were during the Vietnam War, when the draft was in effect, they show a steady increase over the past four years and a 42 percent jump since last year.

OMFG! UP 80%! A 42% JUMP! WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DOOOOOOOOOO?!?!?!?!?!

You want to know what percentage of soliders are deserting? Less than 1%.

According to the Army, about nine in every 1,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30, compared to nearly seven per 1,000 a year earlier. Overall, 4,698 soldiers deserted this year, compared to 3,301 last year.

But I guess that "LESS THAN 1% OF SOLDIERS DESERT THE ARMY" doesn't make a good, solid anti-war headline, does it?

Friday, November 16, 2007

The 'Cold War', or WWIII, saw a corrupt tyranny eventually collapse attempting to face down the American Republic. For all the frightening moments the morally bankrupt strategy of "MAD", or Mutually Assured Destruction, seemed to keep both sides in check until that unexpected, although in hindsight inevitable, collapse.

But I have a rhetorical question for you. Is a militant theological tyranny, such as that ruling Iran, rational enough to be held in check by MAD or are their pronouncements not rhetoric and indicators they will in fact continue to pursue an ever escalating proxy war against their perceived enemies?

Will it be 'funny' when Iran's Hezbollah drives a nuclear weapon into East Jerusalem and levels that city making a fallout poisoned wasteland out of a city holy to Christians and Jews for thousands of years?

Because of the UN's IAEA enablement Iran is in fact only months away from deploying that first nuclear weapon:

Iran has installed 3,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium - enough to begin industrial-scale production of nuclear fuel and build a warhead within a year...

How hard does the UN's IAEA and it's Egyptian head Mohamed ElBaradei work to enable Iran's nuclear weapons program?

The IAEA says the uranium being produced is only fuel grade (enriched to 4%)...

"only fuel grade"? Which UN's IAEA "knows" about a plant they are not allowed to inspect because the Iranians tell them so... even as the Iranians hand over plans for nuclear warheads they purchased from Pakistan's nuclear proliferator:AQKhan?

A nuclear weapon is the only sort of warhead Iran's multiple-warhead rockets can usefully deliver.

I'm always annoyed when the MainStreamMedia propagates the lies of the terror supporting Mullahs by insisting on parroting the fraud that the Iranians are enriching Uranium for "peaceful purposes". Why? Why is it so obvious Iran is lying?

Iran has no generators, for converting nuclear plants energy to electricity, and no plans to buy any.

No transmission lines are being laid... past the anti-Aircraft emplacements.

Iran actually has no nuclear reactors to consume the fuel. Zero.

The Russian ones under construction obligate the Iranians to buy fuel from Russia.

Iran also doesn't have the technical capacity to clad the fuel rods, for use in a nuclear reactor, even if they could enrich fuel.

So only a liar would tell you that Iran isn't enriching uranium for the same reason Saddam Hussein was... which is why we removed almost 400 tons of Yellowcake Uranium and a couple of tons of partially enriched uranium from Iraq.

But that misleading statement isn't the only "BigLie" advanced by the UN's IAEA. They also invent excuses to delay action:

Against the fraught backdrop, a meeting of senior officials from the UN security council's five permanent members and Germany to decide on sanctions, planned for Monday, was put off after the Chinese delegation said it could not attend.

The critical meeting has been pushed back to later this month, giving time for the six-nation group's negotiator, Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, to hold last-ditch talks with Iranian officials.

...

David Albright, a former UN inspector and now an independent nuclear expert in Washington, said ElBaradei appeared to be trying to put "a happy face" on a worsening situation. "The main issue is that Iran now has 3,000 centrifuges," he said. "The report doesn't even judge the quality of the information being offered, but it's clear it is giving minimal answers."

Now the IAEA's report is out, and they find the Iranians to be "generally truthful." The Iranians had "accidentally" received blueprints for a nuclear warhead (as part of an illegal transfer of nuclear know-how), which were "accidentally" discovered by the IAEA, and we are still supposed to believe that (a) they aren't working towards a nuclear weapon, (b) they don't have other blueprints with which they weren't quite so careless, and (c) the IAEA's standard for compliance has always been "generally truthful." This wishful thinking can only lead to one conclusion--a nuclear Iran. And, while the use of force to prevent such an outcome is certain to be painful for all parties involved, diplomacy just isn't going to work, because the IAEA is all trust, and no verify.

Wow. Talk about a mind-bending video. This slice of propaganda comes from the sanitized, slicked-up English version of Al Jazeera, as masked Palestinian terrorists attend International Humanitarian Law and First Aid training classes run by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Al Jazeera tries to show us the human side of a gang of remorseless murderers. Without taking off the masks, of course.

But the lowest of the low... the most inexcusable element of the apeasement-enablement of Islamofascist terror has to be America's (D)emocrats. As KLo illustrates

“Today’s vote is another unnecessary political stunt by Democrats in the House. Congress should focus on continuing to support America’s military and intelligence professionals as they work to improve security and stability, not micromanaging for political gain a very real struggle against radical jihadists.

“I want to bring the courageous men and women of our military home quickly and safely as much as anybody, but just as we are beginning to see tangible improvements in security in Iraq, now is not the time to burden the effort with the same old political maneuvers of the past—maneuvers that have already failed 40 times.”

WILL ANY OF the Democratic candidates be able to summon the courage to concede an American victory in Iraq?

...

..."facts on the ground" now at least admit a trend leading to what might reasonably be called victory: a suppression of the insurgency; a steep reduction in the level of domestic, sectarian violence; the existence of a constitutional government not unfriendly to America; a gradual reduction of American force presence with diminishing American casualties; and the assurance for a period of a continued base of operations from which to handle other possible contingencies in the region.

But if this outcome "on the ground" can be called victory--and why should it not be?--there is a huge potential problem looming in our ability to acknowledge it.

WASHINGTON - When the Democratic presidential candidates pause from beating Hillary with a stick, they join in unison to pronounce the Democratic pieties, chief among which is that George Bush has left our alliances in ruins. As Clinton puts it, we have “alienated our friends,” must “rebuild our alliances” and “restore our standing in the world.” That’s mild. The others describe Bush as having a scorched-earth foreign policy that has left us reviled and isolated in the world.

The Democrats are living in what Bob Woodward would call a state of denial. Do they not notice anything?

France has a new president who is breaking not just with the anti-Americanism of the Chirac era but with 50 years of Fifth Republic orthodoxy that defined French greatness as operating in counterpoise to America. Nicolas Sarkozy’s trip last week to the United States was marked by a highly successful White House visit and a rousing speech to Congress in which he not only called America “the greatest nation in the world” but pledged solidarity with the U.S. on Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, the Middle East and nuclear nonproliferation. This just a few months after he sent his foreign minister to Iraq to signal an openness to cooperation and an end to Chirac’s obstructionism.

...

...new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who noted “the great change that is taking place,” namely “that France and Germany and the European Union are also moving more closely with America.”

...

...relations with Australia are very close, and Canada has shown remarkable steadfastness in taking disproportionate casualties in supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Eastern European nations, traditionally friendly, are taking considerable risks on behalf of their U.S. alliance. And ties with Japan have never been stronger.

... it’s telling that Congress apparently doesn’t even understand how the DoD’s budget even works. Just what exactly is this Congress good for if it doesn’t even understand its most basic Constitutional role?

Everyone’s probably watching the Democrat debate, but here’s a clip that’s worth preserving. During budget testimony today, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey faced off against Sen. Ted Kennedy. Kennedy snarked about the state of the military and asked sarcastically which enemy that it has faced has put the Army in the state that it’s in. Gen. Casey’s answer, more or less, is the Democrats who cut the military’s budget in the 1990s have put the Army in the state that it’s in.

What was it that Hillary Clinton once said about the willing suspension of disbelief? For congressional Democrats, that line has gone from a put-down (of Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress) to a way of life. On Iraq, Democrats now live in a fantasy world. That’s why they can ignore the surge’s success and — after all we’ve learned over the last year — persist in trying to condition funding of the Iraq war on a drawdown of troops by the end of 2008.

...

As the political tide in Congress has ebbed away from the hard antiwar Democrats over the last year, their Iraq proposals have gone from dangerous, to contemptible, to — now — simply pathetic.

Now that the Democrats suspect that the U.S. is not only not losing Iraq, but may well “win”—victory being defined by stabilizing the country with a radical cessation of violence—expect the critique suddenly to morph as well.

Moving the goalposts... again...

Also expect Democrats to find ways to exaggerate the aggregate costs (like counting the rise from 20-100 dollars a barrel for oil entirely due to the Iraqi war without notice of the new Chinese/Indian demand, unrest in Africa, and declining production from the UK to the US)...

No 'War for No Oil'?

...the US military has eliminated a large number of terrorists, insurgents and general terrorists since 2003. Given the noxious fumes of Vietnam-era “body-counts” we don’t mention this. But many of the sheiks suffered horrendous losses among their tribes to the US in the past four years that led to some demoralization and the simple absence of their more skilled and veteran fighters. So, when they weighed the odds—increasing oil-generated wealth on the one hand versus being mowed down by the US on the other—the choice was to join us.

In other words... America is winning and the American military is getting a lot better in spite of the (D)emocrat's claims and efforts.

Yeah, it's a little old (boy, is it!) but it's worth mentioning that the Democrat American Communist Party is one again trying to fight against victory for all they're worth. Only this time, Defense Secretary Gates let them have it with both barrels:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that unless Congress passes funding for the Iraq war within days, he will direct the Army and Marine Corps to begin developing plans to lay off employees and terminate contracts early next year…

“There is a misperception that this department can continue funding our troops in the field for an indefinite period of time through accounting maneuvers, that we can shuffle money around the department. This is a serious misconception,” Gates told reporters at the Pentagon.

As a result, he said that he is faced with the undesirable task of preparing to cease operations at Army bases by mid-February, and lay off about 100,000 defense department employees and an equal number of civilian contractors. A month later, he said, similar moves would have to be made by the Marines.

Some members of Congress believe the Pentagon can switch enough money to cover the war accounts, Gates said. But he added that he only has the flexibility to transfer about $3.7 billion — which is just one week’s worth of war expenses. Lawmakers, he said, may not understand how complicated and restrictive the situation is.

I say let's start the layoffs in Democrat American Communist Party Districts, starting with Murtha's home territory. We can then move to Feinstein's home base and continue on down the line.

This is all a snowball effect from the military cuts during the 1990's. We have civilian contracters in Iraq right now, doing jobs that the military should be doing. And they're doing this for two reasons - 1) as the military has been cut in half, many of the support positions were eliminated. Cooks, mechanics, laundry, showers, all of them took hits. So now we have civilians in Iraq making $60-$70k cooking meals, or doing laundry. 2) Since it's not the military supplying these contracters in many cases, then it's not the military that's paying for all of them. The military budget could not pay all of them. The military budget as a percentage of GDP is the smallest it's been since before WWII. And the hacks in Congress want to start playing games with it. Again.

So now we have the Democrat American Communist Party playing their games with the military that they loath and refuse to support. At least someone is calling them on it.

Kennedy snarked about the state of the military and asked sarcastically which enemy that it has faced has put the Army in the state that it’s in. Gen. Casey’s answer, more or less, is the Democrats who cut the military’s budget in the 1990s have put the Army in the state that it’s in.

I read this story with disgust, but truth be told I don't see a damn thing happening about it.

Witnesses who spoke with the AP said that, despite pledges to deliver adoptable strays to shelters and humanely euthanize the rest, the island's leading private animal control companies generally did neither.

News that live animals had been thrown to their deaths from a bridge reached the public last month when Animal Control Solutions, a government contractor, was accused of inhumanely killing some 80 dogs and cats seized from three housing projects in the town of Barceloneta. A half dozen survived the fall of at least 50 feet.

The AP probe, which included visits to two sites where animals were slaughtered, found the inhumane killings were far more extensive than that one incident. The AP saw and was told about a scale and brutality far beyond even what animal welfareactivists suspected, stretching over the last eight years.

People in Puerto Rico don't have the same attitudes towards pets that Americans do. It's common for someone to just drive their dog out to the middle of nowhere and drop them off when the owners get tired of the pet. I've seen packs of stray dogs everywhere I go.

The pet disposal scandal adds to Puerto Rico's poor reputation for treatment of animals. Cockfighting is legal, with matches shown on television. One of the island's beaches is known as Dead Dog Beach - a place where teenagers drive over live puppies sealed in bags or cruelly kill them with machetes and arrows, according to animal welfare groups that photographed the atrocities.

My parents always told me that if you want to see a person's true nature, you must observe them doing one of two things - driving, or playing sports. Because that's when the mask slips. They concentrate on doing something else, and not on putting up a show for the world. I would add that how a person treats their pet is an indicator of how they'll treat someone else.

A former Animal Control Solutions employee told the AP that he witnessed another worker in 2005 dragging 12 to 15 small dogs out of a van along a road outside San Juan. Normally, workers injected animals with a euthanasia drug but on this day there was none. The animals were instead given an overdose of a sedative and flung 50 feet into a trash-filled gully. Some of the dogs were alive as they crashed on top of junked beds, bottles and other garbage.

"I could hear some of the dogs whimpering as they hit the tree branches and then the ground," the former employee said as he stood with AP journalists in the muck at the site, which still holds the stench of death.

Not all the dogs died, however. A dog that was not a stray, but a sickly pet whose owner wanted it euthanized, managed to limp home. The angry owner telephoned the company and demanded it retrieve the dog and do the job right, the former employee recalled.

Do you feel sick yet?

One dog, stuffed in a sack, was found recently at the Cayey site among other bagged carcasses. It apparently survived the fall and managed to poke its head out of the bag before dying, said Carmen Cintron, who runs an animal shelter.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Proclaiming a sense of new energy and empowerment, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday issued instructions to Catholic voters that their eternal salvation could be at stake when they cast ballots.

Bishops emphasized that voters must consider the church’s teachings on abortion and other moral issues when they select a candidate for the White House or any other office. If they don’t, bishops said, it’s not clergy who will judge them but God.

Here's my problem. I firmly believe that the church has no business in politics, other than as a matter of a politician's personal faith. While I faith in the church, I have little to no faith in an individual who dabbles in politics, and any man of the cloth who feels the need to interject himself into a political race immediately earn my suspicion.

The church has dabbled in politics before. The result wasn't pretty. Let the church be the church. They have no need to lower themselves to politics.

I’ll be the first person to champion the cause of equal rights for women but it has a caveat and it is a big one: As long as they accept the benefits AND the risks (or the rights AND the responsibilities). Women are still being coddled only now they demand it. They want to have all the “choice” in these situations and all the empowerment, but when it comes to accepting the consequences for their decisions (which in the case of having a child is footing the cost for raising the child) she wants… BZZZT… a man to be forced to do it.

Sorry, honey. You want the choice, you get all that goes with that.

That does not, however, let the man off the moral hook. A truly honorable man would:1. Not have sex outside of wedlock.2. Would not engage in sex without birth control, unless he wanted a child.3. Support his offspring, regardless of the circumstances of their creation.

But that doesn’t mean you get to bring the Jack Booted Thug to the party.

We HAVE a mechanism whereby a woman can be assured that her children will be supported by their father. It is called marriage. Without it, you got nada in the way of guarantees.... which, by the way, is FINE if a woman doesn’t want those guarantees, but she doesn’t get to play BOTH sides of the fence. You either get married with all the requirements of that arrangement, and with that you have financial security for yourself and your children, or you go it alone.

Via Michelle Malkin, I see that some sanctimonious prick is once again lambasting conservatives for driving big trucks and SUV's. And he's doing it from the Huffington Post.

Uh-huh. I may have been born at night, but it wasn't last night. You want to know when I'll actually think about getting serious about conserving gas?

When the hypocritical shitheads move out of their huge mansions in California, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee (and various other places that I haven't mentioned).

When the hypocritical shitheads stop using more electricity in one month than I use all year. (This one is for you, Al)

When the hypocritical shitheads stop flying their private jets all over the place and fly in coach like I do.

When the hypocritical shitheads get rid of their own huge SUV's, limo, and other gas-guzzling vehicles that they use to parade around in.

In short, when the hypocritical shitheads actually use less gas, oil, electricity and wood than I do! As Instapundit has said a few times "I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who claim it's a crisis actually start acting like it's a crisis." I'll be damned if I listen to a bunch of eco-freak "do as I say not as I do" loons who get their jollies off of telling other people what to do while they go do whatever the hell they want to.

Shortly after she opened it, the poor dog had a label on her head that read "Dog". I'm half-afraid to sleep at night, lest I wake up with a "husband" label put on me while I slumber. I almost expect to see the labels "Front Door", "Sofa" and "Refrigerator" when I get home today.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

1. a person of Leftist ideology coupled with violent tendencies, wild imagination, prone to over-react and completely unable to deal with reality.

See also - Protests in Olympia, WA. Not only are these people crazy as shithouse rats, but their irrationality and avoidance of logic and truth are once again coupled with violence. And the city of Olympia seems to not care, as the reaction to these thugs has been damn near nil.

They're not using enough pepper spray in my opinion. Of course, I'd not only be using pepper spray but baseball bats, sledgehammers and other various implements that I might find.

You want to know what's really messed up? You want to know how I'm steadfast in my knowledge that these stupid bastards don't possess human intelligence? They're protesting military equipment that's coming back into this country. They're not preventing anything from going to Iraq; they're preventing people from going home!

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Why did this numbnuts frame the issue in terms of the Republican versus Democratic Parties when he’s really making a point about Christian doctrine? Might it have something to do with the left’s newfound interest in wooing religious voters?

I’d be more impressed if Mr. Bike-Path to Heaven didn’t believe in accelerants for Jews.Dean’s Prayer:

Our Society, who art in Washington, hallowed be thy bike-path.Thy Taxes come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in our delusions.Give us this day our welfare state.Forgive us our fabrications, as we refuse to forgive those who we imagine lie against us.And lead us not into rational thought, but deliver us from the Republicans. A-persons.

While that would normally produce a "Well, DUH!" from my readers, the focus of my ire today is the State Department. Judging from old Foggy Bottom's actions during the Bush administration, one would be able to think that the State Department's goals and objectives are to work against the USA, rather than for us. Well, this latest bit of pablum is just more confirmation: "This Pretty Much Kills the Iran Democracy Program"

WASHINGTON — The former director of President Bush's flagship democracy program for the Middle East is saying that the State Department has "effectively killed" a program to disburse millions of dollars to Iran's liberal opposition.

In an interview yesterday, Scott Carpenter said a recent decision to move the $75 million annual aid program for Iranian democrats to the State Department's Office of Iranian Affairs would effectively neuter an initiative the president had intended to spur democracy inside the Islamic Republic.

You know what I would like? I'd like to find a solution to the Iran problem that does NOT include dropping bombs and sending in troops. And I'd fund whatever program out there might get me that solution.

I guess the State Department feels differently.

Hell, this is the same department where so many spineless, bootlicking pustules were whining about being sent overseas that one of their own felt the need to bitchslap them. The list of things that the State Department has screwed up in this decade alone would take gigabytes of space to document. Well, chalk another screwup to them.

I'm wondering just what it's going to take to clean them up. Or if they can actually be cleaned up. I don't think they can.

But that was nothing compared to the damage done in the dark hours of Sunday morning by vandals who kicked down thousands of the flags and left behind a cardboard sign with a single word splattered in red spray paint: “MURDERERS.”

Yeah, they support the troops - on the other side. Does anyone know what holidays the Leftists hold sacred? I'd love to be able to show the same amount of disrespect as they show my country day after day.

We've all heard the stories, many true, some apocryphal, of soldiers returning home from Vietnam only to be disrespected and shunned by an ungrateful nation. How many were called war criminals or spat upon is as controversial as it is unknowable. But there's one thing we know our troops never experienced. We never filled the movie theaters during wartime with films calling them war criminals, rapists and, figuratively, spitting on them or on their mission.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on."

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.

As for me, Veteran's Day is the day for me to reflect on all the men and women who have died for something greater than themselves. Whether it was to free themselves from tyranny, defend this country in it's early years, to right the horror of slavery, to defeat evil in it's many forms, or stand the wall facing our various enemies over the years, brave men and women have given their last full measure for this country and all who inhabit it. I personally don't think that one day to remember their sacrifice is enough. So make the most of it.

Thank a veteran. Volunteer at a local cemetery during the year. See if the VFW or American Legion need any help. Do just one small thing to recognize local vets. Because if everyone did just one small thing, the end result would be massive.

We enjoy the freedoms we have today because of those vet's sacrifices throughout the years.